[ale] Value SSDs - price/perf

[david at tuxteam.com (David Tomaschik)]

On 12/08/2010 06:04 PM, Chris Fowler wrote:
> I'm thinking of going SSD in our servers.  Is that a bad idea?
>
> 40GB is _MORE_ than I'll ever need for our software.
>
> We run a ton of perl and mysql.  The MySQL transactions are very low.
> I think my largest database may be 250MB in size and it is 5 years old.
>
> I'm looking at SSD as something that may be more reliable.  Out of all
> the servers we've deployed we've had an unusual number of failures.  A
> majority of failures took place after FedEx had handled the servers.
> So much so,  that our vendor (MBX) started shipping us the drives in
> bubble wrap in separate boxes.
>
> Chris

What are you doing with the database?  Is it mostly a read-oriented 
environment?  How much RAM do you have?

At work, we run our CMS system (Drupal) from a DB server with 32GB RAM.  
That's enough for the entirety of our DBs to be in the disk cache, plus 
all of the index/query caching on MySQL.  PHP overhead far exceeds DB 
hits.  (Even running APC for opcode cache).  Writes are to a 
battery-backed RAID controller, so we run in write-back mode, which 
makes writes comparatively fast.

In other words, your workload determines whether or not SSD gives a 
performance gain.  We haven't tried SSD at work, but I would be 
genuinely surprised if it gave us a boost.

-- 
David Tomaschik, RHCE
Ubuntu Community Member
Moderator, LinuxQuestions.org
http://www.tuxteam.com
david at tuxteam.com [GPG: 0x6D428695]